The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  “I’m not,” answered Tennessee. “I’m from far away.”

  Kirk needed to hear nothing more. He decided that he liked this man.

  “I’ll give you four acres over near Back Bay. It’s only got an old well on her and a crippled wharf, but it’s a place for a man to settle and start a life.”

  “I’ll take it,” Tennessee said, offering a handshake which just about wrenched the man’s hand off his wrist. “You haven’t said the price, though.”

  Kirk stuck his tongue in a far corner of his mouth. He had put all his mental energy into sedge trimming and had not counted on the prospect of dealing with high finance. “We can work that out later. It’s not hard to settle onto a fair price between gentlemen — as long as they aren’t Canadian,” he explained. And that was that.

  “Ian,” Mr. Kirk said to me, “do some good with your life, me son, and take this feller over to Back Bay. Show him the old Hennigar place.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. And I threw myself once again into the back seat and back to nirvana.

  This is all filtered by the years, remember, but I’m sure that she reached across me to roll down the window and her hand slipped and touched my hand. She smiled, I nearly fainted and she showed me a pad on which she had been doodling. There were hearts and flowers and right in the middle something I didn’t understand.

  “It’s very nice,” I said.

  “It’s the state flag of New Mexico,” she said, the first words that ever came out of her mouth.

  “Sure is,” I said, not wanting to sound stupid. And at that moment, looking at a drawing of the state flag of New Mexico in the back sea of a brand new two-tone Ford, beside a beautiful girl, seemed as exhilarating as anything could ever be.

  I pointed down a bumpy lane to the left and Mr. Phillips jammed a hard turn. We hit sand and then a big pothole and scraped bottom. “I’ll need a little more advance information, next time, son,” he said, leaning back over the seat and ad-dressing me.

  I threw up my hands in apology but couldn’t get past a loud mumble of consonants which came out like a mouthful of marbles rolling away in my attempt to say “Stop.” The tide was still a bit high from the storm and besides he was already half off his new property and parking at a bedevilled angle straight into Back Bay.

  “I guess we’re there,” the woman who looked like a movie star said in a breathy, theatrical manner. The front wheels were in the water and the car was parked at a rakish tilt with the front bumper kissing seawater and seaweed alike. The dog, who I would later learn was named Enrico Fermi, woke up and sniffed the salty, fishy air. From the angle I was at, I saw that the woman had on a tight dress, nylon stockings and high heels. There were what appeared to be diamond rings on several fingers and, as she tried to adjust herself on the hot vinyl seat, the flesh of her thighs gave off a soft sucking noise.

  “I love this place,” Tennessee said, backing up to level ground and jumping out.

  “We call it Back Bay,” I said self-importantly as I stepped out of the car.

  From out of the trunk, Tennessee took out a squarish metal box with a dial on it. He plugged a set of earphones into it and another cord was attached to something that looked like a microphone. He stood slightly bent over and looked at the ground like a hunter stalking the tracks of animals. He began to walk a zigzag pattern across his new land, holding the de-vice before him. I had no idea what he was up to and not much to compare it to, so I decided it was a sort of religious ceremony. My mother had dabbled in organized religion and taken me to a couple of churches on the mainland where people performed harmless but bizarre ceremonies like this for no clear reason.

  “What is he doing?” I asked the girl. Her mother seemed unconcerned and even disinterested as she put on fresh lipstick with the rear view mirror tilted her way.

  “It’s a Geiger counter,” the girl said. “He’s counting roentgens.”

  “That’s nice,” I replied. Life was a giant jigsaw puzzle missing most of the pieces. Who was I to question any of it? While the dog jumped out to explore the little beach and the mother began to file her nails, the girl began to colour the state flag of New Mexico with a set of perfectly sharpened Crayola crayons. I heard Tennessee cry out that he found, “low levels — nothing to get excited about but the rock formation looks good.”

  His wife smiled at him and said, “Fm happy for you, dear. I’m happy for all of us.” But she seemed somewhat disinterested for she flicked on the car radio, ran the dial up and down a few times, and finding no music save the singing of global and intergalactic static, switched it off. I was afraid to get out and follow Mr. Phillips around. I didn’t want to leave my favoured place in the back seat. Attempting to strike up more intimate conversation with the girl, I told her about the two-headed monkfish.

  “My father will be happy to hear about it,” she answered, genuinely interested. “Could be some sort of mutation from high radiation levels in the water. After the testing, my father’s friends found some baby mice with seven legs, and only two toes on each foot.”

  “Wow,” I said. I knew I was out of my depth with these new folks. Just then, I think Mr. Phillips picked up a few more roentgens than expected on the old Geiger counter, for he flicked off the headset and let out a whoop ot delight. Mrs. Phillips turned back to her daughter and said, “I’m always so happy when your father’s happy.”

  “Me too,” the girl said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  It turned out that Tennessee Ernie Phillips had been a physicist who helped to improve upon the atomic bomb by helping to develop the hydrogen bomb. Tennessee had worked hard on the project and after the initial testings he argued that they should go for an even larger explosion than the Bikini bomb or the tests that followed. If they were capable of making a bigger bomb, they should, until they failed. That would be the only way they would learn their limits. Deep down, though, he believed in unlimited power. But Tennessee Ernie Phillips fell out of favour with some of the big wigs back in Alamagordo. There was, after all, the honest-to-God possibility that a large enough hydrogen bomb could set off an uncontrollable chain reaction, and that, indeed, the entire sum total of planet matter would go up in a single blast. I guess Tennessee had not been brought up in a household where caution was important. He caused some grief around the planning rooms and, in the end, they drummed him out of the nuclear bomb business, froze all his personal assets and told him to leave New Mexico.

  Tennessee wanted desperately to continue with nuclear weapons research but he was too patriotic to go over the wall to the Russians. And the government squelched his attempts to tell the taxpayers that his colleagues were too chicken to make bigger and bigger bombs, that the U.S. could split the world in half if only the scientific community had a chance to live up to its potential.

  Phillips was warned: better clam up and keep it all to himself or else. So he packed up the new Ford and his family and drove off into the New Mexico night, his daughter scrawling New Mexico flags in the back seat and his wife punching but-tons, shifting from one distant radio station to another. At first, the family drifted from motel to motel. Then, afraid that the Atomic Energy Commission might come after him, Ernie headed north and east as far as the road would take him.

  “I’ve had too much desert,” Mrs. Phillips said. “I want to go home.”

  Always one to leap further than suggested, Tennessee agreed they would go home, but not home to Boston where his wife, Mildred, had been born. Instead, he would drive them home to Nova Scotia where Mildred’s family, the Swinimers, had come from in the early part of the century before Bluenosers had gone down the road to the Boston States to get away from poverty and cheap fish prices. Not one to go anywhere empty-handed, Tennessee Ernie Phillips had arrived in Nova Scotia to live out his life, bringing with him a beautiful wife, a daughter, a new Ford and enough knowledge to build an atom bomb (given enough processed uranium) and enough gumption to disperse the planet (given the necessary manpower, cash flow a
nd imagination).

  But I knew none of that, there in the back seal; of the Ford, listening to the far off static of the radio. For the girl beside me, Gwendolyn, had finished colouring her flag surrounded by flowers and hearts. I watched as she carefully folded it and put it in my hands. I reached into my pocket, wanting desperately to find something to give her, but all I could find was the bit of Hants Buckler’s ear lobe. I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it to her. She rolled it around in her fingers and studied it in the light. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it before,” she said. “I’ll always cherish this.”

  7

  The year was 1961. I was ten years old and this was the year the foreign government of Nova Scotia caught up with the republic and robbed the children of their freedom. If it had not been for my mother’s pacifism and her insistence to my father that bloodshed was not the answer, I might have been spared my fate. I might not have had to go to school.

  It was the year Kennedy was sworn into office in the States. Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth; the U.S. backed the Bay of Pigs invasion (this one really got my old man nervous). More astronauts — Shepherd, Grissom, Titov went blasting into orbit. U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammerskjold was killed in a plane crash. The East Germans built a wall. On August 13, the very same day when the Russians exploded a fifty megaton hydrogen bomb, the largest explosion ever (surely Tennessee Ernie must have been sulking), a small delegation from the mainland arrived on Whalebone to try to eradicate the republic of childhood.

  Now, an island is a place where people come and go. Coming and going is always news. Strangers coming and going is bigger news but strangers representing any government out-side the republic was even bigger news yet and a major cause for concern. I remember a tall thin woman and a short concrete block of a man. They did all the talking. In tow was a bespectacled, nervous teenage boy who was introduced as “just an observer.” Perhaps he was a university student from the Dalhousie School of Education, studying to become a professional educator and touring the outer fringes of civilization for a first-hand view of what he would be teaching.

  What can I say? It was August and I was fishing off the little bridge over the Musquash. I can’t say I had any ambition about catching anything. In fact, I knew with almost perfect certainty that the big crippled sea trout with the ugly growth on its mouth had already stolen the bait off my hook. I was just kind of lolling around, leaning on the wooden rail, sniffing its perfume of creosote. I was also trying to ignore Burnet McCully, Jr. who was at the mainland side of the bridge, trying to whittle away at the wooden guard rail.

  I didn’t talk to Burnet very often. He was a mean son of a bitch and two years older than me. Little did Burnet know that we would both be victims that day of an insidious plot to thwart our fun come September. There were only three kids who lived on the island — me, Casey, and Gwendolyn. Burnet lived in an old shack just across the Musquash, but he spent much of his life trying to cause trouble either on the bridge or on the island. For differing reasons, none of our parents had seen fit to send us to the mainland schools. All of us received some manner of education at home. My mother had me reading the entire documented history of Edgar Cayce and so far I was up to the point where Edgar healed a man from Alabama of goitre with information he had received while in a deep trance.

  Burnet, on the other hand, had been taught at home by his father the skills of playing card games like Auction Fortyfives, Pinochle, Rummy and Go Fish. He was a quiet, troubled sort of boy who was just waiting for the chance to be around other kids so he could turn into a bully. I tried to avoid Burnet whenever I could. Mostly it was a matter of just getting out of his way.

  Poor Burnet, lacking victims, spent much of his time vandalizing the bridge with a pocket knife and throwing rocks. A born killer, he threw rocks at anything living and if he failed in his first attempt to draw blood, he’d go back for seconds and thirds until a bird or gull or frog was mutilated. My father said he was glad that Burnet lived on the other side of the bridge, that cruelty would not be a good trait for any citizen of the Republic of Nothing. “Such folks do little good for an honest anarchy,” my father would say. “But he comes by these traits honestly.” Burnet McCully, Sr. was a professional lout, the last living specimen of several generations of loutish men who had great swearing skills and could never keep a knife sharp enough to be a good fisherman. Miserable, illiterate Burnet Jr. would be the first among the loutish McCully men to suffer an education.

  Gwendolyn, as might be expected, had graduated beyond state flags and, after memorizing the capitals of all the countries on earth, even the newly formed African republics, was hard at work learning the inner mechanics of the atom. Had school not come along and put a roadblock in the way of her education, she probably would have had a fair knowledge of nuclear physics by the time she was thirteen.

  But on this fateful day, Gwendolyn was at home drawing three-dimensional models of helium atoms. Burnet was stymied in his vandalism by a duller than usual knife blade, squinting at it in the bright sun. Only I, perhaps, was aware that our lives were about to be radically altered. The tall woman, gaunt to the point of emaciation, walked straight to me and fixed me with an eagle’s eye. “Young man,” she said, “in September you will begin school on the mainland.”

  The concrete block of a man was introduced as “Mr. Piggot,” and he smiled the smile of those benignly belligerent souls who hold bureaucratic positions. Leaning against the hood of the car stood the observer, pen and notebook in hand, taking notes. I would never know the name of the woman but later, when learning of a mushroom known as the Angel of Death, would decide that the moniker fit handily. I spooled in my fishing line and everyone focused on the empty hook. “Looks like you’re out of luck,” Mr. Piggot said.

  “Yep,” I answered. “I guess I am.” Somewhere in the world, probably at that very minute, a fifty megaton bomb went off. I had known that kids were supposed to go to school, but my parents had been very sure that there was nothing worth learning in a mainland school. And I was convinced by my father’s insistence that we were indeed an independent country of some sort, that the laws of Canada or Nova Scotia couldn’t touch us.

  The Angel of Death, Mr. Piggot and their observer went on to visit every house on the island, finally locating Gwendolyn and my little sister, but not before they were harassed by Lambert, Eager and even Hants Buckler who claimed he had never seen any children on the island in his entire lifetime. Mr. Kirk, concerned for the welfare of us island kids, offered The Angel of Death and Mr. Piggot a small parcel of land in exchange for the freedom of Gwendolyn, Casey and me, but they considered him a lunatic. He considered them to be more “ugly Canadians!” Burnet McCully, Sr. made no argument at all and just said that they could do “whatever the hell they wanted” with his son.

  My mother would have loved to have held us back from the world longer — especially poor little Casey who had not quite turned six at the time — but she knew it would only bring grief to the island. My mom wondered what her hero, Edgar Cayce, would do under these circumstances and realized that he would let the world interfere if need be, that it would strengthen a soul, not hinder it — if one kept the right perspective and metaphysical attitude about the mundane.

  And so, September the fifth rolled around. A school bus was dispatched to us but would go no farther than the main-land side of the bridge to the island. I held Casey’s hand as we walked across the bridge and off the island for what seemed then like the last time in our lives. Gwendolyn was stoic as she fell in behind us. Burnet stood alone on the far side of the bridge with that familiar sneer on his face. He was not looking at us, however, but at the bus approaching. As the great, yellow beast neared us, Burnet let fly a jagged piece of granite that made direct contact with a headlight and splashed glass all over the gravel road. Inside the bus, the kids cheered.

  What was going on? Burnet must have wondered. After years of being simply despised or at best ignored by islanders, here
he had already found a warm reception for his bad disposition with the mainland kids on the bus. He smiled and held his fisted hands up as the bus driver, enraged by the incident, stormed out of the bus towards us. I hauled Casey and Gwendolyn out of his path. We watched as the man lunged for Burnet. The bus driver, a bearded man in a logging shirt, picked up Burnet by the scruff of his thick neck and slammed him down hard on the hood of the sickly orange-yellow bus. “Fish turd!” I heard him call Burnet, then lifting him high off the hood, he gave him a solid kick in the ass and shoved him towards the door. Burnet got in without resistance. However, once inside the strange hallway on wheels he was facing a smiling crowd of mainland kids who applauded him wildly. A legend had been born.

  The bus driver turned to Casey, Gwendolyn and me, dipped his hat, smiled what was almost a polite smile and then, through his teeth, said, “Nothin’ but island trash. Now get in, the rest of yous, before I kick your butts.” We got in.

  Maybe I was trying to protect my little sister or maybe I was just too fidgety in the new situation, but I felt my world crumbling. When I saw Gwendolyn sit down beside Burnet in the seat and then give him a soft, sad look — I suddenly got scared. Exactly what I was afraid of, I didn’t know, but I immediately felt a warm hot bead of liquid run down my leg and straight into my shoe and I knew it was going to be a very bad day. Even though it was the last time I peed myself in the twentieth century, I still shudder to think of that moment. And I shake involuntarily, a quaking tremor that issues up out of me much as this poor parent-planet must have shuddered that day in August when fifty megatons of atomic might were detonated inside her ribs somewhere beneath the wilds of Siberia.